Given that everybody in the conference hall was involved in digital marketing in some way, and how much of website visitor tracking is done through Google Analytics, you might even speculate that was a foolhardy statement and that the only thing that saved the speaker was the cordon of riot police brought in specially for this talk. But then the man on the platform was Ammon Johns – a man with almost 20 years of SEO experience who is recognised by the industry as someone with a huge amount of SEO knowledge and who speaks at some of the largest digital marketing conferences around – so the riot police were little troubled, although many eyebrows were raised.

It turns out that the main aim of the talk wasn't actually to get everybody in the room to boycott Google, but to make us think. And that’s what I’d like you to do throughout this post – question the common wisdom that Google Analytics is the best thing since hypertext protocols and ask yourself whether it might actually be harming your business.

Why is Google Analytics so great?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Google Analytics is brilliant for four reasons:

It’s very easy to use

Everyone else uses it, so it must be the best

It integrates brilliantly with AdWords

It’s free. Who can argue with free?

The big question is, are these really the right reasons for choosing an analytics tool? Does “easy to use” mean “easy to get actionable insights from” or something else? With Google being a hugely successful corporation, are they really giving me a huge chunk of data for free or am I paying in some other way?

Is Google Analytics actually easy to use?

Google Analytics is definitely easy to set up. It’s also easy to get data out of and it’s easy to get rid of data you don’t want. But spitting out data isn’t the point of a web analytics. The point is to provide insights that let you build testable hypothesis and so improve the performance of your platform.

We’ve all seen the Google Analytics home screen – now the Audience Overview screen – with its visitor graphs and its language breakdowns. But have you really studied it? Head over to Analytics, take a look at that Audience Overview screen and ask yourself “how can I improve my business with these data and these data alone?” I’ll give you a few minutes of thinking time.

Did you manage to find anything? I would be very surprised if you did. Now that’s quite a shocking statement: you went to the first – and so by definition most important – screen of a tool that millions of people use every day and I don’t expect you to have found anything useful. Ouch.

That’s because while Google Analytics is very easy to set up and it’s very easy to see the data it spits out, it’s actually very difficult to get real insight. Almost every valuable analysis requires creating a custom report. You want to use cohort analysis to determine whether you have taken the right approach on a channel? Custom report. You want to see which blog posts drive the most and best engagement? Set up JavaScript events then build a custom report. You want to integrate offline sales data from your CRM? No can do; you will be able to when you get Universal Analytics, but only using (all together now) a custom report.

So there are plenty of things in Analytics that could be easier. But how can we make them easier? The problem here comes not from the data being collected but from the way it’s displayed. One option is to suck the data straight in from the API to your own set of reports that can not only be branded nicely but will only show the graphs you want to see, set up in the way you want. It’s not actually all that difficult for a good developer to do, and if it saves you time each week or month then you can make a good business case for investing in such a solution.

If you can make the business case for building a custom interface for Google Analytics, though, it might be worth asking yourself the question posed at the start of this post: “is Google Analytics really the best solution out there for me or can I justify investing in something else?” Take a couple of hours to explore the web analytics ecosystem and see if you can find a solution that would make it easier to deliver real, actionable insight.

Just because everyone else uses it, is Google Analytics really the best?

I started the last section off with a challenge, so I’ll do the same here. Don’t worry, this will be a simple one with no trips off to Analytics. Ready? Define “the best”. Go!

OK, so that’s actually what a mathematician would define as “complex”: a question that’s easy to ask but difficult to answer. The reason it’s difficult to answer is twofold:

This is probably the first time we’ve ever asked ourselves this question

The answer depends hugely on context: who is asking questions of our data, why they want answers, who is going to do the analysis, and a whole range of other factors

The reason I asked the question is that if we can’t define what “the best” means, how can we say Google Analytics is the best solution?

There are some things it does brilliantly. Tracking visitor flow, aggregating data over multiple pages and channels, letting us look at engagement. But there are some questions it simply cannot answer. For example, what would your reply be if your boss asked:

“The average time spent on this landing page is two minutes. Is that because they were reading the copy or because they were comparing our product to our competitors?”

“How well are the videos on our site engaging visitors?

“People jump from their mobile, to their work PC, back to their mobile on the train home, then onto their home computer. How can we track this happening to get a real picture of cross-device behaviour?”

“What happens if people have cookies turned off?”

Hands up all those who said “ermmm”.

There are tools out there that can do these things:

Crazy Egg gives you heatmaps showing what proportion of people have scrolled down a page and how many have clicked links on a given page (I personally love Crazy Egg. No affiliation, they just make a great product).

Digital Analytix from comScore lets you track individuals across devices. Universal Analytics will bring in this behaviour to some extent, but only for people who sign in to their Google accounts while browsing

While you could cobble together a video analysis using time on page, JavaScript events, and a pinch of salt, Digital Analytix gives you data on browser behaviour during video streaming

Piwik is an open source (read “free and fully customisable”) analytics tool that doesn’t use cookies, so doesn’t give you the problem of not being able to track people who have turned off cookies

A screenshot from Crazy Egg used on the Optimizely blog. When a CRO tools company starts using a web analytics tool it could be interesting to take a look (Image credit: Crazy Egg)

For a lot of people those are some pretty fundamental questions that can’t be answered. But some people know enough about JavaScript – or employ people who do – that they can set up event listeners to get a portion of this data. And some people are not asking these questions. But think about whether Google Analytics has ever not given you the answer to a question, or even if you haven’t asked a question because you know it can’t be answered; if this has happened a few times then it might be a good time to head off and do that research into other providers.

Anything free is amazing. But is Analytics really free?

Now I imagine that a lot of people reading that heading have straight away thought “of course it’s really free, we don’t give them a penny”. But think about this: in using Analytics you give Google all of the data. That gives them knowledge about you and your customers, and knowledge, as we all know, is power. So you might not be paying Google cash, but you are definitely helping them keep their position as one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

But more than that, if knowledge is power and power is money then surely gaining knowledge about data and its manipulation is a great learning opportunity and one that will make you a fair return one day. As Ammon said in his talk, “Using Google Analytics doesn’t make you good with data, just with Google Analytics”. Because if you just accept what Analytics pukes out at you, are you really asking the difficult questions that will help your business to improve?

One last thought: the data that Google Analytics gets is yours for free anyway. It’s your information about people coming to your website and interacting with your services, not Google’s. Lots of companies are moving towards data warehouses now, keeping all of their information within their own domain instead of giving it to third parties. And if you have any concerns about privacy following the recent revelations about the NSA and GCHQ then you might consider them pretty sensible people.

When is “Good Enough” good enough?

This was actually going to be the title of this post, but I don’t quite have Ammon’s nerve (and it’s a great topic for a project management post so has been filed away for later use).

As we’ve seen, Google Analytics is not the best solution out there. It’s not even the best free solution out there for some people. But what it is is “good enough”. It’s good enough to get some profound insights out of if you work with it, and like Excel, even better if you can build a custom dashboard. It’s good enough if you value those insights over privacy. It’s good enough if you can’t invest the time to learn a new tool that will give you similar insights. It’s good enough if you ask it the right sort of questions.

It might be for him, but is it for you? (Image credit The Meme Wiki)

But – and it’s a big but – for you that might not be enough for you and your company. Do you work for a “data-driven organisation”? Do you want to ask hard questions, make big changes, and get big improvements as a result of the data in your hands? Do you want to stand out from all of the other companies and agencies out there who do analytics in the same way?

If “good enough” suits your needs, dismiss this post with a wave of the hand. But if you think that you might need more than “good enough” in the future, or if you really want to be a properly data-driven decision maker, or if you think that big changes will give you big results I urge you to think about your choices. Explore the options out there; even if you go back to Google Analytics, you’ll come back with more knowledge than you had before. But if you don’t go back, you can look forward to a long, exciting, and rewarding journey.

About BenjaminMorel —
Benjamin Morel is an agency-based digital marketeer and project manager working for Obergine in Oxford, UK. He is passionate about inbound marketing, especially building strategies centered around data and communication. Follow him on Twitter @BenjaminMorel or on Google +.

Perhaps, at which point "good enough" is good enough for you. But if you view analytics and data as central to your business and way of working, or if your competitors are starting to catch you up or outpace you then "not helping as much as other things" and "hurting you" could be the same thing.

I have been wondering for a while about this: Analytics is giving Google great data about the use of your site. Great data about what your visitors are looking at, how long they're looking at it, the way they bounce. Data that could potentially make Google a much better search engine if incorporated into the algorithm.

Through Analytics Google can know which pages disappoint viewers. Which purchases have been made on a site. And more importantly: to see which queries are best answered by which page. Great stuff, unless the non-analytics-using competitor ranks higher simply because Google doesn't know that his page bounces even worse than yours. Google is fishing in the dark about non-analytics sites, compared to all-knowing about analytics sites. Would that be a good thing, you wonder.

Google are not likely to introduce Analytics data into their search algorithm, in my opinion, for exactly the same reason we've seen search data being taken away from Analytics: privacy. Both sides, website owners and visitors, would call that kind of integration an infringement of their privacy. The world's monopolies commissions might have something to say about it as well. A third reason is that we know Google don't like using data outside their control; they're antsy about Facebook and Twitter data to not use it in their algorithms, so they definitely wouldn't trust you or I enough to use ours'.

However, we do know that Google gets data on bounce backs to the SERP from a website, so they do have some information on how useful somebody has found a particular result. They might try to broaden this somehow, but I can't see them using actual Analytics data.

I work with analytics and piwik, and when I have to chose one it is analytics. Of course it's not that easy to see inside and get great view inside to your visitors, but didn't you said "easy" is not a think that should us let decide about an analytics tool?

There is a point you can see here allready - the community, what google analytics has, here is the first person asking about adobe digital analytics. When I have a question how to get some usefull data out of analytics, I could find several posts with right answer.

That is very true, there are many people who have written about how to get certain answers out of Google Analytics. That aspect is definitely part of the draw - but also part of the problem since it precipitates the idea that because "everybody" uses it then it's the best. But if that means it works better than other options you've tried, then it is at least in the running for the best. The big question is, is there something out there even better than what you have tried so far?

I tried McDonalds and Burger King and now I decided for McD :)Or I gave Piwik a try and I am not a Fan of this analytics tool for several reasons. I can understand what you mean, but I am not that sure, thats it is worth the hours of work to try other tools out, as long as I can get all that I want very fast with a tool I allready have.

Maybe I would work several hours just to say at the and - ok I allready used the best option. I tried more tools than Piwik and Google Analytics - atm Google is the best option of all tried tools. Maybe there is one wich fits better to me, I actually do not know :(

Of course there are going to be people out there for whom Analytics may be the best option (well, best within a certain set of parameters). The trick is not to confuse "best" with "easiest".

If you've tried Analytics and Piwik and found Piwik wanting then is that because you are too used to Analytics and need to give Piwik more time? I don't know how you ran your tests, so take that with a pinch of salt. But it is important to not confuse a poor test with Piwik being a poor test subject. You need to know objectively that it was the solution and not the test that was at fault before writing off that solution.

Even then, the answer to the question "why was it not as good as GA" can be very revealing. It can give you new ways to think about data and it can help you find out why you do things in a certain way and think about whether that is the best way.

It is always valuable to spend time working with new products and challenging received wisdom. Even if you spend a full day getting to know a product and only learn one thing that helps you analyse your data better, the business impact that single learning could have makes it worthwhile. The aim is always to learn about and improve your own abilities, as much as to learn about other products.

But then I'm biased about that point - it's something of a life philosophy for me.

dont get me wrong, I don't want to say Analytics is the best tool. I am one special case and I would say If you can try all tools ;)

Piwik is to slow for the Data Sets I need - so it's not Piwik in real, its the server where its installed. So they client hosts are the Problem. When I need Data for 360 Days I can go out, drink a coffee and came back and see - an Error, again. Anoying. I know thats not really a Piwik problem, but thats my case. plus I need to check and install Updates - brr

I used Piwik for my private sites, fast and without errors - and my Hoster updates it for me. In that case it works great. But my clients sometimes have bad providers wich they dont want to leave...

Digital Analytix from comScore lets you track individuals across devices. Universal Analytics will bring in this behaviour to some extent, but only for people who sign in to their Google accounts while browsing

Is inaccurate - Universal Analytics does cross-device tracking with your sites account sign-in, not Google account sign-in's. I'm not familiar with Digital Analytix, but I would suspect it uses a very similar mechanism.

"Piwik is an open source analytics tool that doesn’t use cookies" Nope.From Piwik FAQ: "To track visitors, Piwik by default uses 1st party cookies, set on the domain of your website." You can disable them though but no idea how that would affect data collected.

There are so many ways to incorrectly attribute data and have data "lie" to you. In that way so many business decisions get made on incomplete, incorrect, or simply incomprehensible data. Big money decisions ...

Google Analytics is a weather gauge. It simply acts as a point of reference and measure for the tides. It shouldn't be used in replace of common sense and business acumen. Google hammers this in when you study Analytics in their online GA classes. It's not 100%, it's meant for trending.

Sorry, that's not a Google Analytcs issue. Google - and other search engines - are now not passing keyword parameters to any analytics providers due to privacy concerns. It's not Google Analytics you need an alternative for, but keywords. Have a search around Moz and you'll find many articles bemoaning the loss of keyword data and giving you alternative ways to approach the data you do have.

Google Analytics is awesome - there isn't an analytics package out there that matches it for ease of use, you mention ComScore DAX - I love that, but it is certainly not easy to use in comparison ...

It is true that 90% of the accounts I look at have data issues, but I find it easier to diagnose this than Omniture or other packages ...

The greatest issue with free, is that an omniture / DAX analyst should be proportionately priced - i.e. a free Google Analytics account = cheap analysis, an expensive Omniture = expensive consultant... I don't think this is the problem with the package however. I have seen a lot of badly implemented Omniture implementations (Adobe) but they are unwilling to pay for the specialist to get it to the standard required as they have spent all the case on the initial (old) implementation.

You're completely right - if you're going to invest in an expensive tool then invest in someone who knows how to use it. It's not use buying a $3,000 camera for your product photos if you're going to hand it to the intern - you'd get shots that are just as good with a camera half the price.

I personally rather like Avinash Kaushik's 10/90 rule - invest 10% of your budget in tools and 90% in people.

I initially removed analytics because it was slowing down my site. I didn't replace it with any other tracking package either. Instead I have relied on sales to tell me whether I am doing well or not, plus SEMRush to tell me what I'm ranking for.

It was the best thing I could have done. You can end up wasting a lot of time poring over your analytics which doesn't contribute at all to the bottom line. Judging success or failure by hard sales on the other hand tells you immediately what is working and what isn't.

Right agree on it will hurt based on business prospective..if your comparator gaining visitors and generating revenue for their organization with same products and same quality..its really hurt an entrepreneur prospective..

The key is asking the right questions and defining metrics that really matter. Metrics that provide insights and perhaps more importantly provide information that you can use to make improvements. If the tool can provide you with meaning metrics then it's fit for purpose, if not, keep looking.

Thanks Keri for replying.But still i looking to get answer of my question.If you see Referral traffic in Google analytics. the website shows 58 visits and i want to see statistics of these visit like city, Landing pages & Browsers Analytics says "There is no data for this view." .

It sounds like either adding secondary dimensions might help you. If not, custom reports will be your friend.

Or are you right and your solution isn't catered for properly in GA? There might be a workaround to make your reports "good enough" in GA, but if you want to do something GA really doesn't like then building your own tool might be the way to go. It's an investment, but one that could pay off.

Some nice things have been pointed out in this article. Google or any company for that matter would not do anything just for charity. Giving GA for "Free" gives then the best possible raw data and it would not be a matter of surprise if they plan their algorithms and updates extracting data from this mammoth source.

GA has also gained trust as 67.5% of the total searches are made on Google and that helps its tools to gain popularity and trust. Being "Free" gives it the second best tag for being popular. I am not sure if people losing something by using GA but defiantly it is hyped to a great extent and there are alot of better tools that could be used to extract some much better results.

Great article. Giving Google full access to your data can actually hurt your business. On one of our sites, a technical guy messed up the analytics code, and a big part of our site wasn't measured for almost two days. Much to our surprise, the problem actually lead to a decrease in Google search traffic. We also noticed an overall decrease of the avg. position of our keywords in the search query report in webmaster tools. We recovered fully within 2 weeks, but I still find it quite strange that a measurement issue in Google Analytics could lead to traffic loss.

Ben, Keri, Search traffic was always pretty stable on the site. After the hick-up with the Analytics code - when Analytics was tracking again - we noticed that the search traffic had dropped by approx. 20%. This lasted for about two weeks and then search traffic came back to previous levels. There were no other apparent reasons for search traffic to go down.

hard to prove without more tests but, theoretically, Google could use analytics data in its search algo. When your tracking code was broken it could have looked like a severe drop in traffic/engagement.

It can be--especially if you have a large dynamic website. As you know, any analytics package accumulates data extremely fast. Here are Piwik's recommendations:

What sort of server performance do I need to run Piwik?if your websites have less than 1,000 pages per day, Piwik works on most hosting even the cheapest ones.if your websites have less than 10,000 pages per day, Piwik works well on fast shared hosting and virtual servers.if your websites have more than 10,000 pages per day, you may need virtual server or dedicated hostingPiwik is fast up to at least 300,000 pages per day, and we know of several websites with 10 million pages and more using Piwik with great success. We hope to see many more power users use Piwik in the future!

Ah yes, for websites that have significant traffic - or if you are at an agency with a number of clients - then one potential upside of GA is that they host the data for you for free. But as I ask in the post, is that really an upside?

Letting somebody else host your data might lower your monthy expenditure, but there are good reasons that many larger companies - those people whose websites are likely to receive 10,000 visits per day and more - are warehousing their data.

And if you don't have such a large volume of traffic and aren't an agency, is the cost of keeping your data fully under control really that much?

Hey, your perspective is new at least to me, but it is not a good idea to blame someone who offers you a free lunch for being too salty. What about the way out? Buying tracking tools from third parties?

You're right, some people might not like the idea that I'm criticising Google Analytics. But then, if we only do what everybody is going to like then the world will quickly become a boring place ;-)

But to continue your free lunch metaphor, is something given to you for free likely to be the best lunch you've ever had or is it likely to just fill a hole? What if you know you can make better yourself with little effort? What if you can spend a dollar just down the street for your favourite meal? Is the free lunch really worth it? The answer to that question depends on whether you're looking for something to fill a hole - something that's "good enough" - or a great experience. As I note in the post, if you truly want to be data-driven then you should be looking for the great experience with analytics packages.

Also, to counter your objections to "buying tracking tools from third parties", if you use GA you're doing that anyway. Google aren't part of your company, they're a separate corporate entity: so by definition they're a third party. And you are buying their tools. Perhaps you're not paying with cash, but you are definitely paying with your data.

Excellent, I am half convinced till now. I like your classification of Google Analytics as third party, perhaps we are too familar with GA or Google, so we reject a tracking tool provider who can provide us much better service, of course paid service!

Lot of good points I'll have to come back and look at when I have more time. Good headline.

Like many, I find Google Analytics frustrating. I wish a company with so much money would spend more time on their existing products as opposed to rolling out so many updates and such. It's a shame they so often are seen as hurting more than helping, at least to a lot of people reading sites like this.

Love the bold idea. It does make you think and ask good questions about Analytics. I like Statcounter but there's a lot missing from it. I use Analytics because it's "industry standard" as you mentioned - but is it the best? I guess that bears more looking at the question.

Great post. I've used site stats over the years and really like, it's a paid service, might be free now. GA has grown up over the years. I've never really liked the idea of giving google that much info on my sites.

Since the (not provided) keyword change I find webmaster tools yields better data than GA. I have used other analytics platforms like Clicky and found them just as good. If you're in the Adwords game, GA is still hard to beat.